with this statement

SELECT IF( T.CmmtHrs, T.CmmtHrs, 0 )
as 'committed hours'
FROM TimeOffHdr T

and no data in the table I get empty set returned.

Empty set (0.00 sec)

The result I would like to get is zero is this possible

+-----------------+
| committed hours |
+-----------------+
| 0 |
+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

masternone
masternone@hotmail.com

Are you using PHP? If so, you could use MSQL_NUM_ROWS after your query to check how many rows were returned. If rows are less than one then it is an empty set and you can set committed hours to zero in the code.